The home of Matthew Amster-Burton

Menu

Snow sandwich

We’ve now had snow on the ground for over a week, which is unusual for Seattle. We live at the top of one of the steepest hills in our neighborhood, which has become a sledding/snowboarding/skiing hill night after night until long into the morning. A couple days ago we saw someone going down the hill in a wheelchair. Iris sledded down twice and then got wet socks and had to come inside, which makes her a girl after my own heart.

One day during this endless silent barrage, we got a few inches of snow and then a layer of freezing rain atop the snow. Iris and I went out and karate-chopped every glassy surface we could get our gloves on and had a contest to see who could extract the largest unbroken sheet of ice.

I was explaining this unusual weather to a friend. “Then more snow came down on top of the ice layer,” I said. “So you had a thin crunchy layer between two soft layers, kind of like a breaded pork cutlet sandwich on a soft bun. Wait a minute, I was going to make burritos for lunch, but now I’m going to make a pork cutlet sandwich.”

Folks in my parts laugh when they hear that either coast got a couple of inches and it’s paralyzing the city. But in so many ways it’s a ton easier to drive over a foot of sub-zero powder, which will stick together and provide some amount of traction, than it is to drive over fractions of an inch of the white stuff on the East Coast or PacNorWest, where each flake has it’s own boundary layer of ice and water and concentrated slipperiness.

I’ll take two feet of snow over a micrometer of black ice, any day of the week.